Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Helen Hambly and I had an interesting discussion this morning on the possibilities of using Ushahidi or a similar platform to support a participatory GIS initiative for sustainable agriculture. Among other things, maps can provide data on what she referred to as 'proxy indicators' related to natural resources and households. She explained to me how in parts of Africa is it possible to infer household income levels from satellite images of rooftops. For example, rooftops made of tin versus those of organic materials can be an indicator of household income.

Proxy indicators are just one possibility. Communities might use open GIS platforms to support a variety of knowledge sharing activities around crops, land use, livestock, etc. The important thing is to help the community to understand the value of such data and to provide means by which community members can do it themselves. These means are partly technical but also require awareness building and training.

One of the areas that may be worth exploring for our study is how a social practices approach to knowledge mobilization might help identify possibilities for participatory GIS practices.

Another area to explore is the range of options available to support participatory GIS practices. Ushahidi is a valuable platform but surely there are other possibilities that might be equally or better suited to agricultural communities of practice.

You probably use text messaging to Tweet your friends, classmates or colleagues. In the developing world, more and more people are exploring the “killer app” of messaging and related technologies to earn their livelihood and escape poverty.

Helping smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia to use information and communications technology (ICT) to improve their lot is the purpose of a new project involving U of G’s Helen Hambly.

This fall, the professor in the School of Environmental Design and Rural Development (SEDRD) made her first-ever visit to Sri Lanka under the three-year, $200,000 project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

The project involving Canadian and Sri Lankan academics is led by Gordon Gow, director of the graduate program in communication and technology at the University of Alberta’s faculty of extension.

Gow invited Hambly a year ago to join the team. She teaches in SEDRD’s capacity development and extension program, and has worked with Farm Radio International and rural radio in Africa, notably in Ghana.

“Her work with Farm Radio International caught my eye,” says Gow, “and her work that connects agricultural extension to new communications technologies positions her as an excellent co-investigator.”

Text messaging – called short messaging systems (SMS) in developing countries – allows smallholder farmers to use cellphones to gain information for tending their small plots.

Women harvest onions in Sri Lanka.

Says Hambly, “Farmers around the world have almost no access to a telephone main line, but they have pervasive use of cellphones. Text messaging is the killer app.”

For example, an extension service might text farmers about an upcoming field school on pesticide resistance in rice. Or producers might receive messages with crop management advice, weather information, availability of plants or livestock, or soil test results.

Podcasts may be archived on the internet for farmers to listen later. Interactive services would allow farmers to ask experts about a particular problem.

The team plans to establish texting and radio and extension services for farmers in the study area around Kandy in central Sri Lanka.

Several Canadian and Sri Lankan organizations held a workshop in Peradeniya on Oct. 15 to provide an introduction to and basic training in the use of free and open source software (FOSS) to enable agricultural community groups and individuals to implement and use easily-accessible tools for communication, information collection, knowledge sharing, data visualization, and interactive mapping.

Participants were introduced to four Free and Open Source software platforms that are in wide use around the world: FrontlineSMS and FrontlineSMS:Radio for text messaging, Freedom Fonefor creating small scale interactive voice response systems with telephones, and Ushahidi for creating and curating interactive maps with geo located reports from mobile devices (i.e., crowdmapping).

It was is part of a Canadian funded partnership development project to establish and support the activities of an emerging international and multi organizational research partnership with the broad goal of enhancing capacity for local innovation through appropriate and sustainable ICTs. To this end, the project partners are working together to develop a set of case studies that will examine how academic institutions, government agencies and international organizations can work with local communities to enhance knowledge mobilization for sustainable farming practices using low cost, widely accessible information and communication technologies such as mobile phones and radio broadcasting.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Dr. Gordon Gow is Associate Professor in Communication and Technology, University of Alberta. He
has experience working in information technology for development (IT4D) projects in Sri Lanka since
2006. His research focus is on deploying low cost, sustainable communication services for communities
of practice through his Mobile Applications for Research Support (MARS) Lab at the University of
Alberta. Dr. Gow administers the grant and plays a central role working with the Sri Lanka
partners to establish technical capabilities and training for deployment and evaluation of communication technology and services.

This is a Canadian-funded partnership development project
to examine the use of low-cost information and communication technologies (ICTs)
for knowledge mobilization among agricultural communities of practice. The primary
purpose of the project is to establish and support the activities of an emerging
international and multi-organizational research partnership with the broad goal of
enhancing capacity for local innovation through appropriate and sustainable ICTs.
To this end, the project partners are working together to develop a set of case
studies that will examine how academic institutions, government agencies and
international organizations can work with local communities to enhance knowledge
mobilization for sustainable farming practices using low-cost, widely accessible
information and communication technologies such as mobile phones and radio
broadcasting. Partnership development activities will take place in three phases between
2012 and 2015. The first phase of the project centres on a set of core activities
intended to establish working relationships among partner organizations and
to establish a work plan for achieving the mid and long term objectives of the
partnership. A set of case studies identified during the initial phase of the project will provide
the basis for an Integrated Action Research Strategy based on a community of
practice framework. This approach begins with a collaborative study to explore the
social practices that communities engage in with respect to knowledge mobilization
for sustainable agriculture. The initial study will specify a methodological framework
and research instruments to develop qualitative descriptions of agricultural
communities of practice in order to suggest areas where low-cost ICTs might
be introduced to enhance knowledge mobilization both in terms of expert and
indigenous knowledge. A rapid prototyping method will be developed and
introduced to support the implementation and assessment of a small set of short
duration pilot projects to test ICT enhancement ideas. Results from the pilot projects
will, in turn, provide a basis for further discussion of the impact of ICTs on the social
practices of knowledge mobilization within the communities and possibilities for local
innovation. The third phase of the project will reflect on and critique findings from the
integrated action research study. The partners will work together to propose a
model for ICT-enhanced knowledge mobilization that integrates local communities
of practice in partnership with local university, government, and non-government
partners; in relation to this, the partnership will also develop a training strategy
to transfer capabilities to local communities to enable rapid implementation and
evaluation of ICT-enhanced services to address emergent needs and knowledge
acquired of local agricultural communities of practices. The third phase will also
focus on the development of an ongoing and expanded partnership arrangement
with a longer term research agenda. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.